1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recording apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Apparatuses that record an information signal such as a moving image signal in a randomly accessible recording medium such as a hard disk, a memory card, and a digital versatile disc (DVD) and reproduce such an information signal have been known. A home hard disk drive (HDD)/DVD recorder, for example, stores data of TV programs of a predetermined period (several tens of minutes to several hours) in a part of an area in the HDD. Such a hard disk recorder has the function of enabling a user to view stored data of the TV programs later if the user failed to view the programs when they were originally broadcast (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-348514).
A HDD/DVD recorder repeatedly records, as described above, data of a TV program received immediately before in a part of the area in the HDD. On the other hand, in contrast to a home HDD/DVD recorder, some video cameras have no internal HDD. Thus, there is an issue that such a video camera cannot record a scene that a user failed to shoot before a start of shooting.
Thus, for a video camera, storing a moving image immediately before the starting of shooting repeatedly in a memory such as a built-in dynamic random access memory (DRAM) is considered. However, only a scene of several seconds at the longest can be recorded in the memory and a longer scene of several minutes to several tens of minutes cannot be stored. Therefore, it can also be considered that moving images before starting to shoot are repeatedly recorded in a part of a recording area in a replaceable recording medium (e.g. memory card) for recording shot moving images to prevent a failure to shoot.
When a moving image is recorded in a replaceable (preferably randomly accessible) recording medium, as described above, the recorded moving image is normally managed as a file according to a file system such as the File Allocation Table (FAT) file system. If a moving image is managed as a file, moving images may be deleted in units of file (so file by file) when a moving image file is deleted from the recording medium.
In a general-purpose file system such as FAT, an upper limit of a size of a file is set. Thus, if a size of a moving image file currently being recorded reaches the upper limit during shooting, the file being recorded is normally closed and a new file is opened to continue the recording.
Thus, when moving images are repeatedly recorded (or loop recorded) in a part of the recording area in the recording medium, moving images will similarly be recorded by dividing a file if the size of the file reaches the upper limit during recording. More specifically, moving images are sequentially recorded in the part of the recording area for repeated recording and when free space runs out, a moving image recorded first is deleted to record a new moving image in the same area.
At this point, while the moving images are deleted in units of file, the upper limit size of a file is normally set large so e.g. to several GB. Thus, moving images of several minutes to several tens of minutes will be deleted at a time for repeated recording, leading to poor usability.
In recent years, file systems with virtually no upper limit of the file size such as exFAT have emerged. When a repeated recording is performed according to such a file system, moving images after starting the repeated recording will similarly be deleted at a time when free space runs out.